Month: March 2013

The truth is a slippery fish

Saint Patrick’s Day and my mind
goes to two things.  First the soup we will have for dinner tonight, leak and
potato with toasted bread and butter. 
It’s a tradition we built up over the years mostly because most of us in
this family enjoy the soup, one of my husband’s specialities. 
He found the recipe in one of those
newsagent’s cook books that came out years ago, one that specialises in Italian
cooking.  This Women’s Weekly cook book, or is it from New Idea, a magazine my husband likes to re-name No
Idea as a joke in honour of his perception of the magazine’s mindlessness?  Except for its
recipes, the Italian cook book offers simple tasty delights, including the soup, which
we eat on Saint Patrick’s day, in spite of the fact it’s called Saint Joseph’s
Day soup in Italy.
My mind then pitches back to the
Saint Patrick’s Day march of years gone by, in the days when I felt proud to
be a Catholic.  One day a year as
close to Saint Patrick’s Day as possible, we school children marched along Collins street, which
the police had cordoned off and every school sent a cohort of boys and girls
to represent them. 
We marched in order of schools,
presumably based on the age of the school.  Saint Patrick’s College, my older brothers’ school, a Jesuit
school then located in East Melbourne near the cathedral, now no more, came in
first, and my school, Vaucluse Convent, run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, once in
Darlington Parade Richmond and also now no more, came in second. 
The school captains held the
banners high in front of every group and Archbishop Simonds, who took over from the famous Daniel Mannix, led the procession
in his black cathedral car.
It’s timely I should be writing
this now on Saint Patrick’s Day and after they have just elected another
Pope.  I no longer feel proud of
my catholic inheritance.  I disowned it long ago in a manner of speaking, not
that you can ever disown your past. 
It’s there with you forever whether you like it or not.  However, it is possible to learn from
the past and not hold yourself responsible for things that you were born into,
things not of your own making.  
At
least that’s how I see it now and that’s why I’m troubled by this idea I’ve
seen on Face Book and in other parts of social media that go on about
un-baptising yourself or excommunicating yourself to be freed from responsibility for the wrongdoings of certain members of the church .
I see no need, largely because I
imagine the whole thing of baptism and belief is a construction, a thing that is human made
and therefore able to be reconstructed in any way we see fit, simply through an internal decision to stay or to leave. 
Of course any belief system can be
dangerous if its endowed with supernatural powers and when the powers-that-be encourage the young, naïve and
innocent to take beliefs on board as gospel truths.  Hopefully, most of us learn to modify
our views on such dogma soon enough, 
though when I was young, very young, right up until my adolescence I took
my religion on board as the ‘truth’. 
Now I think of  the truth as a slippery fish.  You can only
grasp it momentarily before it slips off into the ocean and you have to spend
long hours fishing for another truth in the form of an equally wriggly fish that
might also slide into your hands if you’re lucky enough but again only momentarily
before it too slips back into the ocean. 
We can remember the sensation of the
truth.  We can play around with how it feels, how important it might be, and we can
modify our views; but the idea of holding firm to the truth leaves us only with
a dead lifeless fish in our hands, no longer fluid, no longer free to swim the oceans and grow stronger and bigger. 
Maybe that’s too simple a metaphor
but strangely when my husband just now went to look for the recipe for Saint
Joseph’s day soup we could not find it in the Italian cook book after all.  
My memory, my truth has failed me.  We found a version of Saint Joseph’s day soup through Google but
where I wonder is the original?  I
had hoped to photograph a bowl of soup for you and post it here so you too might enjoy the image and the tastes it evoked. 
See what happens to the truth?   It slips away in the shadows of memory.

Without memory or desire

Remember the words to the song: We’re having a heat wave?  The weather at its extreme affects everything and when it’s hot day after day it’s hard to keep on thinking let alone writing.  It’s hard to sleep.  A sheet is too much.  The fan whirrs its way through the night and interferes with my dreams but the mornings at least are cool, at least for a few hours before the sun forgets we’re in autumn and bears down on us as though we are mid summer. 
On the other side of the world folks will be preparing for spring and normally I feel sad at the last of the summer but not this year.  This year there is a general plea across the sound waves, let it end.
Yesterday I received a letter in
the post, a short letter typed and tacked onto a plain white card with a photo
as its frontispiece.  I recognised
the handwriting on the envelope as coming from my correspondent and friend,
Gerald Murnane.  He and I have been writing to
one another for several years no, almost ten years by my reckoning, mostly long
letters but this time Gerald has told me that he wants me to know that his
letters will be reduced for the next several weeks/months because he is in the  middle of writing yet another book, his
eleventh I think. 
I have mixed feelings when I read
this note. Fair enough I think, he’s busy but then the internal carping
begins.  For one thing I’m jealous
of Gerald’s ability and opportunity to tackle yet another book – at the ripe
old age of 74 – and for another, even if I were totally immersed in a book,
which I sometimes am though never quite as thoroughly as GM, I
would not dismiss my regular friends with a fob off until their book is
finished. 
I know this is unreasonable.  GM’s position is the more appropriate.  Why should he not consider his own needs? 
At least he has written to let me know as much.  He writes further that the photo included features ‘the sky at evening’ near
Goroke ‘when smoke from the Grampians covered western Victoria’. 
This weekend, a long weekend in
Melbourne for Labour day my husband is making tomato chutney.  Despite the heat.  His sister dropped off ten kilos of
ripe old fashioned tomatoes. By old fashioned I mean tomatoes grown in the
soil of her garden without all the added gizmos that commercially cropped
tomatoes include.  They taste
better as a consequence. 
Last weekend my husband made Italian
sausages, the week before German bacon. 
He’s on a home cooked produce burst which pleases him greatly.  
The only thing I can do is write, but
when the writing goes badly I can feel jealous of those people who appear to be
productive, like Gerald and my husband.  My desire to be productive can bring me unstuck.  

There’s this notion in
psychoanalytic psychotherapy, care of Wilfred Bion, that a therapist enter
each session ‘without memory or desire’. 
It’s a tough one.  To my
mind almost impossible but the spirit of it is sound.  The idea is that you enter each session afresh, ready to see
what comes up and to approach it with an open mind. 
I try to take the same approach
whenever I settle down to write. 
To see what comes up for me, and hold no concern for the outcome.  It encourages a certain freedom of thought, especially the
idea that I have no expectations of how the writing will go, of what I might
produce, of whether it will be worthwhile or whether it will disappear along
with so much of my writing into the wastepaper basket of time. 
I’ve spent years at writing
school.  I’ve spent years at
therapy school and there are always rules about how to proceed, theories about
how to relate to the person who comes to see you, how to put pen to paper, your
fingers on the keyboard.  Everyone
has a slightly different take.
I have this urge now to write about
a video I watched yesterday of a certain Eric Wolterstorff  who teaches a bunch of
students on transference and trauma.   It comes in the form of a YouTube demonstration.  
I enjoy the way the man presents
his ideas and I enjoy his ideas. 
They derive in part from Freud’s thinking but they branch off into ideas
from systems theory.  One idea
being that in each group, beginning with the family constellation, people tend
to take on one of a series of roles at different times.
These roles ideally are fluid.  In other words a person can have a
preferred mode of operating most of the time but there will be times when the
person will slip into other roles. 
And that is best, according to Wolterstorff.  The roles each have their advantages and their
disadvantages. 
The first role – to me the obvious
one – the one into which I reckon I most readily slip is that of the
caretaker.  This is the person who
says to herself.  I don’t have a problem – she
may have one, but she tells herself she’s okay, namely not in profound need – I’m okay, but I’m responsible for everyone else here.  
The second role is that of the
identified patient, in the family, in the group, the one who is seen to be most
in need of help.  The IP as
Wolterstorff refers to him/her is the person who assumes, without words more
often than not, but through his behaviour, I have a problem and I’m not
responsible for fixing it.  
In  Wolterstorff’s words, ‘I serve you
in the relationship by holding the anxiety for both of us.  Your job is to take care of the
problems.’  I put myself in this
vulnerable position in which I am helpless and it’s your job, therapist
or other members of the family to fix things for me.
The third category is that of the
distancer.  The one who says, ‘I
don’t have a problem and I’m not responsible for fixing it.’  You lot can fight it out among yourselves,
I’m off.  And the distancer takes herself into the next room to watch television
while the rest of the family war on. 
The forth and final category in
this somewhat over simplified schemata is that of the outcast.  The outcast says in a somewhat aggressive
manner, again not so much in words as in behaviour: ‘I have a problem.  I am the problem and not responsible
for any effects on anyone else. 
Got a problem with that?’ 
It’s not my responsibility this problem so if you want me to change it
you’re going to have to set to work to fix it.
Wolterstorff  refers to these roles as a function of
what he calls ‘procedural memory’. 
Are you with me here?  or have you switched off? 
On paper it might seem boring but
coming as it does from this man whose delivery is comforting, thoughtful but
simple enough to understand, I found myself watching all four of these presentations and
wondering how they might apply. 
Wolterstorff also talked about ‘event memory’ where he described the way in which a group of people whom researchers interviewed ten years after the Space shuttle Challenger disaster recalled the event.  The people interviewed were about ten
years old at the time of the tragedy. 
Apparently, the subjects remember the core significance
of the event after the trauma but they tend to forget the peripheral details, the
things surrounding the event tend and tend to distort or alter them in oder to fill the gaps.    
This is typical for all of us when we try to remember.  We lose
contact with the surrounding details and so begin to construct bits and
pieces of memories from other events and times.
Memoir writers do it all the
time.  Therefore memory is
unreliable, though Wolterstorff argues and I’d agree, the core memory of the traumatic
event itself tends to stay and be remembered with some degree of accuracy. 
Which brings me to another aspect
of this talk which I found fascinating in relation to ‘event memory’, namely the notion
that part of our memory of the event is built around those who were there, and
the roles they might play. 
The questions are:  who was watching, who did it, who
helped and who was hurt?  Wolterstorff divides these roles into the observer, the perpetrator, the saviour and the victim,. 
Again he reckons it’s important that we can be fluid within these
roles.  
It’s not helpful to get
stuck in any one role for good, though it seems some people do.
Hence I’d argue the value of
empathy.  Empathy enables us to see things from other people’s perspectives,
including the uncomfortable ones of being the perpetrator.  Who wants to see themselves as a bully?
 If we get stuck in a role or lose the ability to combine
roles, we cannot move forward fluidly throughout our lives. 
If you think on it, you too might
see that at times you take on one or another of these roles.  I become a bully because I am bullied.  I stand by and watched as
another person is bullied because I cannot bear to be the victim.  Let
someone else take on that role.  All
four positions move over time.